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It’s hilariously tragic when people like Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George make idiotic statements like, “Marriage comes to us from nature.”
Nature? Where the closest thing to marriage is often for a male to chase down a female, rape her in the bushes, then run off to hunt a wildebeest or something? Or where a male kills the cubs his female had by another male in order to protect his own genetic line?
Just the facts, ma’am…
As any fan of detective fiction knows, the answer to a mystery must be derived from the evidence collected during the investigation. No stone can remain unturned, and no doubt ignored. The detective must pursue any credible lead, no matter how inconvenient.
So let us start at the beginning of Cardinal George’s claim by looking at the whole quote:
“Marriage comes to us from nature. The human species comes in two complementary sexes, male and female. Their sexual union is called marital. It not only creates a place of love for two adults but also a home for loving and raising their children. It provides the biological basis for personal identity.”
They got one thing right in this statement: the human species comes in two sexes, male and female. That much we can observe in nature.
Bloody, bloody nature
My boyfriend is a fan of the Resident Evil franchise (both the games and the movies). I am not but find the series’ villain, the Red Queen, fascinating because of its literary origins. In the game, the Red Queen is an artificial intelligence that monitors an underground laboratory complex where biological experiments take place. The name is taken from the character of the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, who says to Alice at one point, ”It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”
It’s also the title of Matt Ridley’s 1995 book, The Red Queen, in which he hypothesizes that the sex drive fundamentally fuels all human behavior, and that human intelligence itself is largely a result of sexual selection. According to Ridley and other evolutionary biologists, sexual reproduction itself is an ongoing experiment, with each generation either an evolutionary success or failure. You survive, or you do not.
Let’s talk about sex, baby!
For the sake of brevity, from here on I’m going to assume that everyone reading this understands the basic biology of human sexual reproduction. (If not, just Google that sh*t.)
There’s a concept in evolutionary biology known as the “cost of males.” Human sexual reproduction is highly inefficient It’s effective in that it ensures a diverse gene pool from which to build from, but that’s about it. Females are saddled with the majority of the work when it comes to reproduction, their bodies turning into living nursery pods for a fetus to grow in. After birth they’re usually stuck rearing the offspring too.
Males, on the other hand, do little aside from contributing sperm and 50% of the genetic material. Males bear no offspring and in most species do not contribute to the survival of young. It’s a costly evolutionary investment.
Mixed signals on marriage
If (as the Church teaches) heterosexual monogamy is “God’s design for humanity,” the Lord has an odd way of achieving it. Richard Dawkins writes, “one male can theoretically produce enough sperms to service a harem of 100 females.” The goal is to spread his genes as far and wide as possible. Plus, men don’t go through menopause, as women do. So the “design” suggests that it’s actually to a male’s advantage to be promiscuous!
Females, on the other hand, need to be more discriminating in choosing a mate due to gestation time and the fact that they only have one egg to fertilize at a time. Where males value quantity over quality, females are the opposite. Dawkins writes in The Selfish Gene:
One thing she wants is evidence of [his] ability to survive. Obviously any potential mate who is courting her has proved his ability to survive at least into adulthood, but he has not necessarily proved that he can survive much longer.
If nature shows us the model for marriage, we would see much wider prevalence of monogamy in the wild. As it is, our current estimate is that only 3-5% of animals live in exclusive pair bonds, which is what the Church really means by “monogamy.”
True, some species are monogamous, but there’s a world of difference between “pair bonds” that occur in nature, and what society defines as “monogamy.” Monogamy itself is a relatively recent concept in human society. It’s only recently that we imposed the same sexual mores on men that have always been placed on women.
The amorality of nature
The point here is not that humans should behave like animals, or we should challenge every religious claim. However, when people like Cardinal George make idiotic claims about science based on their “authority” as Church leaders, we ought to demand corroborating evidence. It would be as if an investigator claimed to know whodunit, but when pressed for evidence merely claimed to have “special knowledge.” You’d want to know who the sources are, the nature of their credibility — not just take that claim on faith.
Nature is promiscuous by necessity — “red in tooth and claw,” as Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote. We humans, on the other hand, have employed science and medicine to extend our lifespan and improve our quality of life. We no longer have to try to beat the odds by producing many children in hopes that a few will survive to adulthood.
What this says is that we don’t get our values or patterns for life solely from nature. Marriage doesn’t exist amongst animals except in Disney cartoons. So for the Church to continue to claim that the theoretical possibility that an infertile couple could conceive a child naturally is reason enough to grant them marriage while actively working to deny same-sex couples the same right is not only bigoted.
It’s downright unnatural.
The post Nature, marriage, and how the Church doesn’t get sex or evolution appeared first on gaywithoutgod.com.